What role does the EU play in supporting researchers to collaborate and partner with other countries?

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Collaborations are vital for science, and scientists want to work with the best in their field irrespective of their geographical location and institutional affiliation.

Researchers often seek to collaborate. Institutional frameworks can enable, facilitate and promote these. For example, researchers in different countries might operate on different funding cycles, which makes collaborations difficult. By pooling resources together and distributing them centrally, EU funding can overcome these challenges, lowering the cost of collaborations and simplifying them. Most EU funded research is intrinsically collaborative, bringing together expertise from different sectors and countries to share knowledge and expand networks.

A number of specific EU initiatives seek to promote and support such collaborations:

Joint Programming Initiatives

Joint Programming Initiatives (JPIs) aim to pool national research efforts to make better use of Europe’s limited public research and development resources and tackle common European challenges more effectively in a few key areas.

JPIs are public-public research partnerships between participating countries within the European Research Area (ERA). Participating countries agree, on a voluntary basis and in a partnership approach, on common strategic research agendas, to be implemented jointly. The ERA-NET Cofund financially supports the preparation, establishment, design and implementation of these partnerships but the operating costs of the partnership come from participating member states.

Currently, ten JPIs are operational and the UK takes part in all of them. These are:

Neurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND)

Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change (FACCE)

A Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life

Cultural Heritage and Global Change: A Challenge for Europe

Urban Europe

Connecting Climate Knowledge for Europe (CliK’EU)

More Years, Better Lives – The Potential and Challenges of Demographic Change

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR)

Water Challenges for a Changing World

Healthy and Productive Seas and Oceans (OCEANS)

Four joint programmes have been initially proposed under Horizon 2020:

Joint Technology Initiatives

The European Commission promotes research collaborations between public and private partners across Europe through its Joint Technology Initiatives (JTIs).
JTIs support large-scale multinational research activities in areas of major interest to European industrial competitiveness and issues of high societal relevance. They are run as Joint Undertakings that organise their own research agenda and award funding for projects on the basis of open calls.

Current JTIs operate in a number of areas of strategic importance for the EU:

Innovative Medicines 2 (IMI2): to develop next generation vaccines, medicines and treatments, such as new antibiotics.

Fuel Cells and Hydrogen 2 (FCH2): to accelerate market introduction of clean and efficient technologies in energy and transport.

Shift2Rail: to develop better trains and railway infrastructure that will drastically reduce costs and improve capacity, reliability and punctuality.

Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) 2020: to develop the new generation of European Air Traffic Management system that will enhance the performance of air transport

Intergovernmental frameworks for research collaborations

A number of European intergovernmental agreements and frameworks exist to foster research collaborations. These are not EU initiatives but the EU and its Member States play an important role in them. These include:

European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research (COST)

European Energy Research Alliance (EERA)

Pan-European network for market-oriented, industrial R&D (EUREKA)

The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI)

What is the IMI? The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is a public-private partnership between the EU and the European Federation for Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) that aims to speed up the development of, and patient access to, innovative medicines. The IMI supports collaborative research projects and networks of different stakeholders (e.g. researchers, the pharmaceutical industry, SMEs, public bodies, patient organisations etc) to encourage pharmaceutical innovation in Europe.

What is the budget? The current second phase (IMI 2) of the programme has a budget of €3.3 billion for the period 2014 – 2024. Of this: €1.6 billion comes from Horizon 2020; €1.4 billion comes from EFPIA companies; and up to €213 million comes from other life science industries or organisations.

What does the IMI Instrument Fund fund? The IMI currently lists over 50 currently ongoing Europe-wide projects, focussed on specific aspects of pharmaceutical development. For example, the CHEM 21 Project is focussed on finding ways to make the chemical processes involved in drug synthesis more environmentally sound. This involves the participation of EFPIA companies (e.g. GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer; UK-based Universities e.g. Manchester, Durham, York and Leeds) and UK-based SMEs.

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